Toward Peace
by Jessa L'Rynn
Summary: The new creatures were half-chaos, half-neurosis; half-Kaled, half-human. But their sound chirped and jangled and throbbed inside the Doctor's skull. A new-born, mongrel race and it was... Oh, it was fantastic.


There's a lot of ideas on my hard drive, stories I want to work on but may not can find the time. They're mostly ideas that come to me, but some of them are what I used to call Glimpses. They're a snapshot view of a series of scenes, drawn out and detailed so that everything comes into clearer focus. I like working on them, and sometimes they make the basis for bigger stories. This one, though, was hard to write. Nevertheless, I felt it needed writing. A definitive moment in the life of the Tenth Doctor, the one with so many definitive moments. This shot is from the moment the Doctor wakes up on the scaffolding above the Empire State Building, to realize there are a whole slew of new Dalek-like beings on the loose.

I hope you enjoy!

* * *

**Toward Peace**

The Doctor awoke to Martha Jones talking, and confusion burbling through his mind. Half-chaos, half-neurosis; half-Kaled, half-human. But it chirped and jangled and throbbed inside his skull. A new-born, mongrel race and it was...

Oh, it was fantastic.

They didn't know the Song, and they were trying to sing it anyway. A thousand voices strong where there had been none, the myriad cacophony of baffled, pre-awakened individuality. Time-sensitives against all that Earth-born emotion and Dalek-born hate, and they were reaching, groping in the darkness of their confused new lives.

Not just human, not just Dalek. There was Time Lord in there, and they were singing to him.

They felt orders and they responded. They were Dalek, after all, and so obedient, and damned if there was anything in that bewildered Gallifreyan snippet that would make them disobey just yet.

So the Doctor sang to them, taught them the Song. He didn't teach it as it had been taught to him, though, not the silent, still, breathless, sterile thing he had learned some time between birth and opening his eyes the first time beneath an amber sky. Instead, he taught them the way he had learned it, as it grew, as time had been added to it. Susan with her mysterious grace notes, Earth with its race that sang mad, perpetual, swirling tenor counter-point. A million stars and planets, adding a vibrant harmony that had as many parts as voices, an endless choir of worlds and thought and deed and oh so much life. Romana with her chiming, glass-like aria, Flavia's soprano descant, Borusa in a basso-profundo dirge, the Master on percussion, a four-beat thunder that filled the song with drums. Rose, at the last, in a single-voiced chorus of the entirety of Time, singing in his head once and only once, in the voice of the phoenix, bringing life from the ashes. Under it all, the TARDIS, caroling glory and joy and discovery, hope and faith, daring and so much wander-lust. Then them finally, now, like children's voices learning their notes for the first time, their harmony simple and sweet, so young, so new, so much to offer.

They came to him, not from the Dalek imperative now, but their own. He was of them, they sensed him, they thought him, they needed him. Conductor and instructor, he would make their song a symphony, and they wanted that, and he felt it. They wanted him. Wanderer, destroyer, killer and shadow. They wanted him, anyway, because he was theirs.

They were his.

Even as the soldier's mien fell over him, taking him back to the War, taking him back so painfully to the last days before the skies burned down, he could feel them, floundering along, struggling through the notes of the Song Perpetual, striving toward that mythical sound that they remembered from him remembering.

He hurt so much and had wanted this all to end for so long, that two losses and two pains had merged in his mind, inextricable, and he was back in the War. He gave orders and expected them to be obeyed because they had been, and now they weren't because Martha was not a Time Lord sworn to follow him. He forgot the War had ended for an instant, and then forgot it again as the Daleks - the true Daleks - blasted themselves into existence before him. But these were new Daleks, strange Daleks with names and the vaguest sense of almost self.

And they'd brought Dalek Sec with them, of course. Daleks had never learned from their mistakes. They would keep him alive to pick that marvelous, creative brain apart piece by piece for as long as they could, the same fate for their second creator as they had bestowed upon their first. They'd never plant him when there was a risk they might need him.

The Doctor remembered Sec, of course, from Canary Wharf: it was the first time the Doctor had noticed a Dalek as an individual. Sec had been actually angry and so splendidly insulting that even the Cybermen had realized he was an uncanny threat. But even then, the Doctor had recognized the emotion and wondered at it. Now, the combination of angry, clever, hate-filled Dalek Sec, and cold, heartless, ruthless human Diagoras… well. It looked very much as if two wrongs had literally made a right.

But it didn't last, couldn't have lasted, because here the Doctor was, still standing, having been saved from Dalek extermination, by a Dalek. Maybe wonders really would never cease.

The Song clattered and chimed louder inside his skull and he knew what he was doing was right. Even if they obeyed now and shot him down where he stood, ripped the tattered remains of his ancient life from his miserable body, they knew the Song, and it would come to them, along with free will. His death, which they would feel, and his silence, which they would know, would short out every sort of power the Daleks could have ever had over them. Even if he died now, it was right, because it wouldn't be dying at the hands of the Daleks, but dying to save the new Singers, instead. Young, small race, part human, part Dalek. And just that little bit of...

"Exterminate."

It was almost funny, really, that even in bonded poly-carbide armor, you could almost make out utter confusion in the set of their eye-stalks and the flashing of the lights. The Cult of Skaro Daleks all repeated the orders, including the third one that existed in all the one thousand minds, and had more power over them than anything.

Anything except the Song, and their young joy in it.

"Dalek-humans will obey."

And then one of them spoke, the very first word the Doctor ever heard from this new species, and it was perfect, because it was also the first word anyone ever heard from a child of one of their antecedents.

"But why?"

Just a little bit of Gallifrey in there, just a touch of Time Lord: that was what he bequeathed them. Their heritage was curiosity, and that desperate need to understand everything before acting on anything. A Time Lord foible, their nearly instinctual hubris, and yet it saved the last of their kind.

The Song swelled and blossomed into full harmony.

"We are not Daleks."

"No," the Doctor said, and loved every one of them as his own children. "And you never will be."

Then, of course, the Daleks couldn't let it go, couldn't let anything that was beautiful and not a Dalek exist. So the two from the Cult of Skaro opened fire.

Human bodies with Dalek minds, they were already born for survival. Add that the Time Lord they clung to had walked through War with the things trying to kill them, and there was no question that they would return fire. The Doctor was unarmed, they must protect him, he could teach them the Song and teach them who they were.

Who they were, the Doctor thought, was precious. He felt every one of the little lives ending as the Cult cut them down with the more powerful battle-armor weapons. However, Sec had left for his children one last thing, because those weapons he'd gifted them could defend them against anything in the Universe, even, if you hit it often enough, the Dalek battle-armor.

It might not have worked if they were at full capacity, with their nigh-impregnable shields. But they weren't and the children fought, and the survivors of the Last Great Time War exploded and the Doctor felt alive again for the first time since Canary Wharf.

"You did it," he told them, calmly, gently. Pride and worry, fear and so much hope, he added it to the Song, even as they added notes that sounded like victory.

But one of the Daleks was alive. The Doctor had forgotten, (even though it seemed he'd spent the last century of his life back in that bunker on Skaro all those ages ago,) that even in their very beginnings, there had always been an eventuality. Even in their genesis, there had been a doomsday switch.

"The Dalek-humans are failures," the last Dalek proclaimed through his link to the children's Dalek control.

"Are we?" they asked him silently, just shy of one thousand wounded, aching voices.

"Never," the Doctor told them, the only peace he could give them.

And then, they died, went out like candles under a tidal wave. The Song died with them, leaving him as he had been before, soloist in the black despair of silence, the TARDIS a perpetual requiem under his bottomless grief.

Gallifrey died again behind his eyes as his companions demanded to know what happened. "They killed them, rather than let them live." Rather than let their race go back to what it had been before Davros picked apart its genetic code and reduced it to filthy, murdering, genocidal, tinned spawn.

It was rage that filled him, the Oncoming Storm, the rage that had hefted a laser cannon and gone Dalek hunting in a bunker in Utah, the sheer blind fury that committed the genocide of a species older than his own, just last Christmas. These things, these pointless, senseless, vile, evil things, they had to be stopped. No more Daleks, not one, because every time he let them out of his sight, they brought back entire armies with them, and wiped out entire species.

Then he heard Martha speaking, and remembered what she'd said, just because he tried to give her orders to save herself. Still, her words took him back, and maybe she would hate him for thinking it, but she miraculously said the right thing to take him to exactly the right place in his past.

"What about you, Doctor? What're you changing into?"

She'd tried to save the Dalek, having made it change. Sec had tried to save the Daleks, knowing they needed to change. There was one Dalek left, only one, for all of creation, one Dalek.

And only one Time Lord.

He used to have so much mercy. War and loss had done this to him, but he still had one thing, just the one, and even if a Dalek had called him on it once – "What use are emotions…", he knew it was the right choice.

There were no planets, no weapons, no technology, no territories or compromises. There was a long ended Time War and a Dalek and a Time Lord. There wasn't anything else they could do.

Peace was all that was left to him. The Doctor nodded, resolute, and stepping over the bodies of all the beauty that could never be, he went to try to lay the past to rest at last.


End file.
